Tech Brief
Today on Tech Brief, Apple ups the advertising ante on Google, Second Life lays off lots of workers, and YouTube faces a tax bill from a country where it is banned.
• Once upon a time, Apple and Google were the best of friends. But in recent years, as both companies have started to encroach on each other's territory, the relationship has turned a little more sour. John Battelle sees the latest move by Apple, which prevents Google's AdMob ads being delivered on iPhone and iPad apps, as :
"As All Things Digital notes today, Apple this week "clarified" its policy with regard to third party networks, and it's hard to read it as anything other than a direct declaration of war with Google. In short, third party ad networks can run in AppWorld, but only if they are "independent". Put another way, sorry AdMob, you're not welcome here."
Battelle reckons that it will increase development costs for app builders:
"This is all we need now - a major platform war, with marketers and developers having to pick sides, cost of development, ad serving, analytics, and marketing services at least tripled (one process for Android, one for iPhone/Pad/Touch, one for Microsoft or Palm/HP or.... ). That's not what the web is about. It's disheartening."
• Meanwhile, Google may be kicking those fun event-specific logos called Google Doodles off its homepage. The search giant has , and most visitors to the homepage are now seeing a picture by default:
"It looks as though Google is trying to reach the huge mass of people who like some sort of personalisation. The idea of the image is to show you that you can do this to the home page; if you click on the bottom-left link to "Change background image", you get taken to a page where you have to log in - or create - a Google account. So in that sense, this is another, subtle advert to get people to sign up to Google accounts, while putting Google on an equal footing with [Microsoft's search engine] Bing in terms of how the page looks generally."
So is the background image here to stay forever? Charles Arthur certainly hopes not:
"[The image-based search page] means it's hard to distinguish it from Bing, and it means that Google can't do Google Doodles any more. And you have to agree that the latter would be a loss - far more so, in their educational and amusement value, than the gain to be had from an image."
• Once upon a time, it seemed everyone had to have a character, or Avatar, in the virtual world Second Life. But the world appears to have moved on, and its parent company Linden Labs .
"Rumors of the layoffs emerged a few days ago, and paint a more detailed picture of the reductions. The report says Linden Lab closed their UK and Singapore offices, cut the head count of the Seattle office by half, let the enterprise group go, and made staff reductions at their Mountain View and San Francisco offices."
The challenge for Second Life, according to Leena Rao, comes from social networks:
"Second Life's user base has been dwindling and clearly the company is trying to take the virtual world in the direction of social networks, after seeing the popularity of gaming on these platforms. But Linden Lab isn't completely dead. The company was reportedly valued between $658 million and 700 million a year ago. If Linden can turn around Second Life and push the social agenda, the virtual world could rise again. Miracles can happen."
• Chinese hackers appear to have , planting a malicious link into innocent-looking banner adverts, on pages including The Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post:
"The sites were infected using SQL injection exploits, which allow attackers to tamper with a server's database by typing commands into search boxes and other user-input fields. The hackers used the exploit to plant iframes in the compromised sites that redirected visitors to robint.us. Malicious javascript on that site attempted to infect end users with malware dubbed Mal/Behav-290 according to anti-virus firm Sophos."
According to Dan Goodin, a group of volunteers quickly managed to take out the destination page:
"Robint.us has been disabled, thanks to a sinkholing effort carried out by volunteer security outfit Shadowserver Foundation. The action will allow Shadowserver researchers to get a complete list of compromised sites and to gather additional information about how the attack was carried out, spokesman Andre' M. Di Mino said in an email. He said the details would be published soon."
• Finally, for today, YouTube :
"'Although the company is not a registered taxpayer, the Finance Ministry has calculated it owes taxes worth 30 Million Lira,' or $18.7 million, Turkey's Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim, whose portfolio includes telecommunications and the Internet, told reporters earlier this week."
According to Thomas Seibert, it all boils down to the fact that Turks can access YouTube, despite the ban. Turkish advertisers have therefore been placing adverts on the site, leading to a tax probe and the multi-million dollar bill. Even the country's leader says he is a fan:
"When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the opposition over the controversial issue of the Islamic headscarf in late 2008, he told reporters they should go on YouTube to see for themselves what he meant. Stunned, journalists reminded him that access to the site was blocked, but Erdogan was unfazed. 'I can get in,' he replied. 'You can get in as well.'"
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